With the wide spread use of Internet (World Wide Web) and/or the increased demands for handling of image data due to users' multimedia-oriented inclinations, it is required to process image data at high speed.
However, an image may be subject to deterioration and a noise may be generated by an image inputting phase (e.g., receipt of a scanner input, FAX data from a public telephone line, an input from a digital camera) and by an image processing phase (e.g., an analog/digital conversion, an image compression/decompression process). Also, in case of enlarging a pattern such as an inputted small character, a resultant pattern having a large corner that is not represented by a smooth curve may be generated.
Such an image including a deteriorated pattern appears ungainly to a user and it becomes sometimes unrecognizable. Also, in case of subsequently performing pattern recognition (e.g., character or graphic recognition), it causes a problem such as degradation of a recognition rate and/or increase of processing time to occur.
In order to solve the problem of prior art, another Japanese patent application (H8-42302), filed on Feb. 29, 1996, by the assignee of the present application, which is not publicly available at the filing date the present application, proposes a method of performing a smoothing process at high speed by using only SHIFT, logical NOT, AND, OR operations of bit strings, without recourse to conditional tests in the form of "IF THEN ELSE" and "SWITCH" statements that have been required in the conventional image process using a mask. However, because this prior method is limited to processing of an image with a specific horizontal size (width) such as 8/16/32/64 bits or the like due to a length of a processing unit or a register, it is now desired to provide an improved method that may be applied to an image with an arbitrary size.
It is, therefore, an object of this invention to improve a processing speed in smoothing a graphic outline.
It is another object of this invention to enable application of a high speed image process using a mask, which is adapted for noise reduction and/or smoothing of an enlarged image, to a binary image with an arbitrary size.
It is another object of this invention to provide a pattern (character or graphic) recognition system that has a high recognition rate.